Tea Party Activist: We're a Movement Under Siege

The black conservative founder of a tea party PAC appeared on Newsmax TV Tuesday and tearfully denied that the political movement to rein in government and champion individual liberty has run its course.

In a voice breaking with emotion, Lloyd Marcus of the Conservative Campaign Committee told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner that tea party supporters are "good Americans" who "love their country" and still represent the last, best hope for the Republic and its Constitution.

Despite a string of recent election losses to establishment candidates in Republican congressional primary races, Marcus said, "The tea party movement is fired up. We are more fired up and functioning than ever before."

But he said that tea partiers are being attacked from all sides — by Democrats, establishment D.C. Republicans and the news media — as racist, radical and unreasonable for challenging the status quo.

He singled out the national Republican Party for "despicably … race-baiting" Chris McDaniel, the tea-party primary challenger in Mississippi, during his failed bid to unseat an aging GOP incumbent, Sen. Thad Cochran.

He said the "racist" charge hurled at tea partiers is at odds with his personal experience.

"I have been to 400 tea party rallies nationwide," said Marcus. "No white person has tried to hurt me in any way."

He also said the stereotype of tea party bigots is reinforced by the media, which he said is "stopping us in every way."

Marcus cited a CNN documentary about one of the many Tea Party Express tours he joined.

"They did not show one of the black tea party member's faces in that whole documentary," he said. "Folks at home are buying the lie that the tea party movement is racist and the tea party movement is against the black president."

Marcus said that many tea partiers voted for President Barack Obama in 2008, but rebelled "when he started to take us down the socialist highway."

"They naively thought, 'If we vote for the black guy … nobody will ever call us a racist nation again,' and yet the Obama administration exploits race at every single turn," said Marcus.

Marcus said the movement has matured from rallies and bus tours to the "more sophisticated" work identifying and backing strong political candidates who are also "rock-solid conservatives."

He said tea partiers came close, for example, in their challenge to Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

Alexander won his August 7 GOP primary fight against a field led by tea party favorite Joe Carr — but by the lowest margin for a sitting Republican senator in that state's history. Carr finished second with 40 percent of the vote — also a Tennessee record in a GOP Senate primary for an occupied seat — despite being outspent by the incumbent in a crowded race.

For all of the tea party's involvement in electioneering, Marcus said it remains a people's movement at heart.

"They are rock solid, decent, hard-working American folks who love their country, and they've had enough," he said. "They don't want us to just keep going further downhill. The culture has gone downhill. Nobody obeys the law anymore, and we have a president who is attempting to make us a nation of entitlement junkies.

"And the American people are saying, 'No, we're better than that. We are Americans. We are good, solid folks'. This is what the tea party movement is."